How Not to Be a Jerk or a Nice Guy

This morning, I'd like you to open to Luke 18. We're going to read from verse nine through to verse 14. Luke chapter 18, verse nine. He, who is Jesus, also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and treated others with contempt. Two men went up into the temple to pray.

One a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee standing by himself prayed thus, "God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week. I give tithes of all that I get." But the tax collector standing far off would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast saying, "God, be merciful to me, a sinner."

"I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted." So far, our reading. A few years ago, I made the mistake of letting people know during a sermon that I'm a secret watcher of the very corny series called Antiques Roadshow. Some people have never let me forget that.

But today, I wanna put up my hand and risk it again by also confessing and perhaps copping more flack, that I'm a regular watcher of the ABC panel show Q and A. This is a show that shows on Monday nights, and it is often, I think, most watched by people who are either in their retirement or are liberal arts students who drink pumpkin turmeric almond milk lattes and think communism is a good idea. So I'm not sure if you watch it, but I do. And I think actually if you wanted to get a really handy snapshot of where the current climate of our society is, of our culture is, whether that is in sort of the temperature of our Australian politics or ethics or sort of the general feel or vibe, to quote The Castle, it's a good show to watch. It's a good show to follow.

It's not everyone's cup of tea, but I think that as Christians, we can stretch ourselves to understand the Australian context a little bit better. Regardless, one thing I noticed when watching the ABC Q and A show is that it tries really hard. It does genuinely do this. To get a Christian voice in the mix, especially when it comes to areas that they believe there's a strong Christian voice, strong Christian opinion on. That obviously, very recently, was the same sex marriage survey and that whole debate. But I don't know if I'm imagining it, but it seems like they always pick one of two options as the Christian voices on these panels. They either pick a Christian who is really aggressive and harsh, cranky, unrelenting, or they choose someone who is a complete walkover, who smiles a lot, who throws out a few clichés like "God is love", and then sits back comfortably as the ABC audience applauds and thinks, "Wow, yeah, that sits really well with what we think."

Now this is obviously not restricted to the ABC, because you look at any type of media outlet and you'll see the same. It's either a really strongly opinionated jerk or someone trying really hard to be a nice guy. It creates a bit of controversy.

You can understand from the media's perspective to get people jumping on their social media accounts and it makes a lot of money for them. But for us, in our quieter lives, in our family situations, or our workplaces, or our universities, or our TAFEs, or our schools, we can also be tempted to fall into one of these two extremes. You are either the cranky jerk or you are the gutless, nice Christian guy. You know what I mean by these two persons, right?

You'll hear the cranky jerk Christian get outraged about how society is going backwards. They'll mourn the loss of a golden era in Australia where everyone was Christian and the whole country lived righteously before God. They are the keyboard warriors on social media or on online platforms who will tell people to abide by Christian principles or burn in hell. They usually have one or two pet hates that they have long-winded arguments about. If you were to use one word to sum up their attitude, it would be the word anger.

They are angry. We all know someone like this. And we perhaps have all, at one point, been someone like this. On the other scale, we have the nice guy. You'll hear these Christians defend the right of people to make their own choices.

That people are inherently decent and may have just gotten a little lost. They will say that Jesus loved all people, that he loved them all the time, and that he never spoke out against things like sexual preferences or abortion. "God is love, and everyone is on their own journey to find God in their own way." The nice guy has a horrible fear that they might turn people away from Christianity if they come across as judgmental. We all probably know someone like this.

Perhaps we've also, at one point, been someone like this. But at any given time, there is a chance that as Christians, we may fall into one of these two camps. We either say too much or we don't say enough. We either jump into the fray, arms and fists swinging, or we stand on the edge like a bashful person and we twiddle our thumbs and we stay silent. How do we understand our role as Christians in a world that may strongly disagree with us?

Specifically, what should our attitude be towards situations or actions that contradict God's will? Well, one suggestion, and I'm sure you've heard it, keeps coming up again and again. It's this cliché, this saying that gets passed around. It's sort of this idea that if you understand this and if you follow this, you find yourself between being the cranky guy and the nice guy. It is saying, "Love the sinner and hate the sin."

Who's heard that? "Love the sinner and hate the sin." And this morning, I wanna take on the challenge of debunking this philosophy or at least reinterpreting it anew. Why? Because this philosophy is actually built on wrong theology.

This is what this philosophy says. It says God isn't really mad at you. God is mad at your sin. Now at some level, this is true, of course. The Bible says that God will judge every person's deeds.

Two Corinthians 5:10 says, Paul writes, "For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ so that each one may be recompensed, repaid for his deeds done in the body according to what he or she has done, whether good or bad." So we will be judged for our deeds. Now this theology or this philosophy says, God can at one time love you but hate what you do. And this sits very, very easily with our modern therapeutic culture where we understand ourselves and our world view in this way. This culture modifies many sins into afflictions or illnesses.

It says that sin is something that can be remedied given proper time, laying on a psychologist's leather couch with the help of the right pills. So vices or addictions, gambling, sex, pornography, paedophilia, stealing, they are just complex disorders that can be exercised through loving oneself more, developing higher self-esteem, or attending twelve-step meetings. Now the flaw, of course, in this view is that it is easy to call it an unfortunate affliction for someone out there, for that sort of theoretical person, to think that that is an illness that they are struggling with. But when sin is done against you, when it affects you, when it is in your life, if sin is simply an illness that just so happened to target some unlucky person, you would have to then say a wife would have to legitimately say to her adulterous husband, "I love you. I don't like it when you stay out all night.

Tell me lies. Go to extraordinary lengths to deceive me and sleep with multiple partners. Please stop so that our life can go back to normal." In other words, just turn off that tap and then we can go on with life. This theology has a view of humanity which believes that a person should not be defined by their sins.

They should not be defined by their mistakes or their failures, because this person can always just stop the behaviour. But here's the problem. "Love the sinner, hate the sin" fails because you can't cleanly make a distinction between a person and their sin. The cliché boils sin down to merely an action, just something you do.

But that's not the Bible's understanding of what sin is. Sin is an impurity that infects us, according to Isaiah 64:6. Sin is an inherited depravity that is part of our fallen human nature, Psalm 51:5. Sin means a willful and open hostility against God.

Not neutral, not sort of apart from God, but open conflict. Sin is an open rebellion against the worship and the rule of God, Isaiah 1:2. Sin means resistance. Sin means fighting against God, Acts 5:39 and 7:51. And then the clincher, and the famous one, Romans 3:10-11.

Sin means there is no one that seeks or desires God. So sin is not just what we do. Sin encompasses what we are. We cannot simply shut off the tap and get back to normal.

D.A. Carson, in his book Christ and Culture Revisited, says this: "The heart of the evil in our hearts is idolatry itself. It is the de-godding of God. It is the creature swinging his puny fists in the face of his maker and saying, in effect, 'If you do not see things my way, I'll make my own gods. I'll be my own god.'" He says, "Small wonder that the sin most frequently said to arouse God's wrath is not murder or pillaging or any other horizontal barbarism, but idolatry, which dethrones God."

That is also why, in every sin, he says, it is God who is the one most offended. As King David himself well understood in Psalm 51: "Against You only have I sinned and done what is evil in Your sight." So the cliché "love the sinner, hate the sin" fails when it meets those who believe their thoughts, their actions are ingrained as a part of their personal identity. For example, it will always fail. This cliché "love the sinner, hate the sin."

It will always fail against the LGBT community, who view that their sexual identity is a celebrated part of who they are. It is not something outside of them that they are doing. It is who they are. It simply cannot be turned on or off. So in this context, they would ask the Christian to love the sinner and the sin. For this reason, the community is actually correct in pointing out the simplistically bankrupt nature of the Christian cliché.

It cannot be maintained with integrity. Why is that? Because apart from the saving grace of God, our sins are our identity. Apart from the radical saving grace of God that makes us born again to see our need, our sin is our identity. This brings us back to the passage we read this morning in Luke 18.

Remember that when we see the Pharisee and the tax collector finding themselves in the temple. And we read that when the Pharisee prayed, he prayed about how different he was from all the sinners. He pointed out how he wasn't an extortioner. He wasn't unjust or an adulterer. And then he pointed to the good things that he also did.

He fasted twice a week. He strictly gave a tenth of his earnings to the temple. Jesus points out someone who looks at his deeds in the Pharisee and weighs up their standing before God in view of that. The tax collector, on the other hand, doesn't look at the work of his hands. He doesn't begin with a list of good versus bad.

He simply says, "God, have mercy upon me, a sinner." And what Jesus wants to do is point us to the fact that you don't get to be with God by pointing out your deeds to Him. Your lifestyle, your wise choices, or your unwise choices, you get to God by knowing who you truly are. A sinner in need of mercy. A sinner both in deeds and in nature.

That is why the tax collector went home, Jesus said, saved, and the Pharisee did not. One understood who they were and the other didn't. That is what happened there. So how do we find then that sweet spot between cranky Christian and nice guy Christian? How do we find that spot where we hold out the truth and we do it with grace?

Well, we can prevent ourselves from becoming either of these guys by being deeply moved by the understanding of God's incredible love and what that means. You see, God doesn't love us but hate our sin. That's not what the Bible says. God doesn't love us and hate our sin as if the two things could be separated. God loves us while we were sinners.

Romans 5:8. We were enemies of God, Romans 5:10. We were objects of wrath, Acts 17:11. We read it this morning.

We were dead in our sins, Ephesians 2:1. We were children of disobedience, following our own desires and passions, Ephesians 2:2-3. We deserve death according to Romans 6:23. We deserve death for our rebellion against God.

But you see, God knew, and He still knows about our sin. He knows about our problems. He knows about our rebellions. He even knows the innermost secret evils of our heart. And 1 John 4 says He loves us anyway.

In this light, "love the sinner" or "hate the sin" is not only a complete cosmic cop out, because it horribly diminishes the majesty and the might of the great love of God. You see, God doesn't love us and sort of overlook our sin. God's love penetrates through our sin. The power of our sin, in other words, cannot hold a candle to the power of God's love. So in short, God does not love the sinner and hate the sin.

God simply loves sinners. That is what it is. And the way that He demonstrated that love, of course, is in how He set sinners free from the bondage of sin. There's a big fat theological word called propitiation. You can write that one down.

You can go and look it up in the dictionary. Propitiation, which means to appease the wrath of an authority. In the Old Testament, the Israelites propitiated the wrath of God through various sacrifices offered at the temple. In the New Testament, we know at the coming of Christ, the wrath of God has been propitiated through the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. In his book Classic Christianity, theologian Thomas Oden describes what this sacrifice meant.

He says, "It is not that human beings can somehow appease God by trying harder. The cross doesn't point us that way. The cross says that God was reconciling the world to Himself in Christ. God does not passively wait to be reconciled, but He actively goes out, humbly suffers for the sinner to reconcile them to Himself. God doesn't wait for humanity to approach, but He approaches humanity.

The saving event is not about God receiving our gifts, but God giving His own gift, His Son, in order to benefit us with salvation." John 1:14 says that the Word tabernacled in our nature. He made His dwelling among us. And so our humanity, he says, is enriched by His coming to dwell and die for us. God has made the first move in our relationship with Him.

And we are simply asked to take hold of that love. And we know that. That's ABC Christianity, right? Christianity one oh one.

But let me say this, if we are a cranky Christian still, we are still trying to make people please God through their actions. Do you understand that? But you know at the same time that they cannot, because you could not please God through your actions. So this crushes that anger because they are sinners in need of saving. They are not sinners needing some fine tuning or a healthier culture to be better.

They are radically lost and drowning. And so what do you do, angry Christian? You have to bring the gospel. And you have to understand who you were then in your trespasses, in which you once lived, Paul writes.

On the other hand, if you are the nice guy Christian, the one that wrings their hands and sits on the edge of the lunchtime table at work, funny thing is we're still thinking our deeds and our actions are important. We think that we might make people like God more if we just portray Him nicely, if we make the gospel sound more PG-rated. The gospel isn't sanitised. It can't be sanitary because it deals with ugly, filthy sin. The gospel cannot be pretty because it took a painful, ugly death.

Your niceness cannot rescue sinners. They are radically lost and drowning. What do we do? We need to bring them the gospel. We need to tell them that they are enemies of God, and yet God loved them by sending Jesus.

They are enemies deserving the wages of death, and yet this is love. As the Bible says, "Not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent Jesus as an atoning sacrifice for our sin." So how do we find the sweet spot between cranky and gutless? Firstly, we understand how terribly flawed we are, no better, no better than any other sinner. Secondly, we understand how incredibly saved we are.

God's grace is our only hope, and by His grace, He has extended that to us. Thirdly, there's no need to shy away from holding out God's word because God can defend Himself. His grace will make it understandable to them or not. His grace will do that. The flip side is we don't need to be angry or defensive about God's will because God can also defend Himself.

His grace will break the heart of the sinner or not. May our God use us according to our personalities, whether we are up front or not so up front. May He challenge us and refine us out of our weaknesses so that we may bring this glorious gospel, by which He has saved us, by which we give Him thanks and will give Him thanks for eternity, to those who truly need it. In Jesus' name, let's pray. Heavenly Father, we pray for our neighbours this morning.

We pray for our country at large, our politicians that are even at this moment debating abortion in state parliament, our neighbours and our friends that are living very immoral lives, even our family members, Lord, that are causing us so much pain and grief. Lord, we bring them before You again this morning because that is all we can do. That is the only thing we can do. And Father, when we get angry or when we get shy, I pray that You'll give us the courage to realise how flawed we are and were, but how incredibly loved and cherished we are at the same time. Father, help us to think biblically.

Help us to think theologically. Help us to think wisely about our life, to not take things for granted, to not assume, and Father, to think deeply and prayerfully about the context we find ourselves in. Father, we pray for our church. We pray for Your grace to move in us and grow us and transform us.

For the sin in our own lives, we pray for Your power to overcome it and to have victory over it. In Jesus' name we pray that. Father, will You give us the absolute joy of knowing You and being loved by You, and let that be our guiding light in everything. And then, Father, we pray that You will open up the doors of this church to reach the tax collectors who know that they are sinners in need of God's grace. Lord, we will preach that until the day we die.

In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.